28 October 2014

My father, Willard Albert William Maas, contracted the poliomyelitis virus in late 1939; seven
other Iowa State University students did as well causing the University
to altogether close down that quarter then. There was at that time a
University inpatient hospital; afflicted were within iron lungs, and
five of the seven died. Daddy at his age of 19, went home to his 98 –
pound mama, Grandma Adeline, who also had at home within the rural Iowa
countryside at the time five younger children, she not knowing if he,
her eldest, would live or when he would ‘get better.’

He was paralyzed from the neck down. It took Adeline two full years
of her own home – therapies of physical exercises and other care. He
survived and thrived enough, although 4 F – classified, to volunteer for
the Army – Air Corps and did.

One day in 1960, with a silage wagon underneath him, Daddy himself was
on the outside of it astride its ladder at the very top of a silo.

Bilaterally and neuromuscularly suddenly, his arms failed him.

His life altogether that day … … changed. He managed to put his
truncal thoracic anatomy forward onto the ladder and with his legs slither
down the rungs to the wagon. And clumsily climb out of it. He went inside to talk
with my mother; and within a month’s time therefrom, Daddy was re-enrolled in the
next quarter’s agricultural economics curriculum ( a springtime one ) at
that same University. We all moved away to its town.

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About Me

! My thoughts are as free as wind o'er the ocean,
No one can see their form or their motion.
No hunter can find them, no trap ever bind them.
MY LIPS may be STILL, ... ... BUT ... I THINK WHAT I WILL ! ( as, and in the manner, of Alsatian pacifists, World War II )
! The whole body of SCIENCE is PROOF against all gods from all religions !
"The most important attribute for 'a real scientist' is: to actually .understand. some science." -- Dr Brian Cox